Digital Poetics #1 Ventolin: Luke Roberts
What they like is direct sunlight
song like glue
and how much things
cost if you want them
to stay still
and understand
defeat this time less euphoric
the disaster too diffuse
to just step into
racing to wake up
before the market
admire the morning air
and wolf it down,
watch them coughing up
holding history by the hand
with one hand
acute and unacknowledged
and with the other hand touching
my face.
Did you hear the one about
the epidemic?
Or the one about the epidemic
and the state?
I heard the one about
the epidemic
a kind of ache
the same as always
lost to the weather and vague
to still want it like this
the parts of the language
you do mouth-to-mouth to
most of you,
and all the time
sticky on lookout
for the gist.
It never gets old.
The prisoners in Modena
and Brixton.
The prisoners at Rikers.
The debris,
the missing
and the message,
what the messengers leave
this time this year
this time this month
this time this week
catching the difference
you tell it to a friend
complete and unretrievable
you patent the question
and give it away.
It gets old,
cut bleeding on the knuckle
stuck
piling up rewrites
what you find on the floor
just falls in
to your lap
like the head of a lover
floating downstream
you spring the day back faultless
break off the brocade
and taste of salt
and aloe vera
taste of salt
and aloe vera
taste of salt
and aloe vera
and alcohol.
Lyric poetry and sobriety.
It’s okay.
I wouldn’t always recommend it.
But it’s okay.
It took years
it took forever
it took all day
and now it’s done
keeping vigil
at the end
of the weird 2010s
spent a decade off my legs
and necking aspirin
while the sun
played aspirin
to the sky
said someone you don’t know
in some other blunt decade
also thinking
of defeat
and have I been here
before,
did we meet somewhere once
did I say something terrible
and brilliant
the glory in shame
the memory of sweat
and who is it
déjà vu
will belong to?
The thing is you get older.
Your friends die.
You lose your sense of humour.
You move away.
And they also
come back
weathered surface
rocky outcrop
tie a ribbon
to the one
you want to cut down
tie a ribbon
to the one
you want to leave.
We were outside the British Museum
as unhappy
as it’s possible
to be
we were drinking lime and soda
changing places in the world
what we wanted was the total break
but not like that
and not like this
hard to give a fuck about Etruscans
day colour
of pigeons
more gloomy
than blueish
keeping vigil’s what I said
to the damage
and fuck a Virgil
and all the filled-in wish fulfilment
of camaraderie
and camaraderie’s paranoid afterparty
who heard a rumour of voting
and a rumour of death
and a rumour of choosing
every time you check the news
you lose a life
and who the life belongs to
on the island sinking into floorboards
more than what we asked for less
or less than nothing less than that
locked in song for chewed-up evening
the mildest winter I remember
getting whiplash
had to learn it
had to sit through
a thousand odes to debt and business
a thousand more to inattention
ill-advised attempts at imitation
fawning under ruthless supervision
tasked with brilliance
in the fairest of the seasons
and the season’s fairest failures
to transform.
Spring——
hand me my airhorn.
Hand me the phonebook.
Point
to the beautiful world :
you smell like sleep
and nothing else
getting fainter all the time
what passes for midnight
moon clipped on the left
dark blue and familiar
windows open
where I live
in retribution
was the shadow
for my friend
all broken up
before you
split
slipped off
drew a line
between the dying
I tried to tell you.
And now the light is dirty
the light
is dirty now
and now you turn a corner
in your head
and in the street
counting days lost to sickness
days lost to strikes
backwards from ten
and miss the target
March 14 2020
Luke Roberts is the author of Rosa (2019), Sorbet (2018), To My Contemporaries (2015) and other works of poetry. He is the editor of Desire Lines: Unselected Poems, 1966-2000 by Barry MacSweeney (2018), and the author of Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of Post-War British Poetry: Seditious Things (2017). He lives in London.
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This publication is in Copyright. Luke Roberts, 2020.
The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
